188 SOCIO-LEGAL REVIEW VOL. 17 2. Right to have rights and jus sanguinis citizenship for Sri Lankan Tamils The question that remains unanswered now is: has the shift towards jus sanguinis citizenship in India caused Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to realise Arendt’s conception of the right to have rights? This section attempts to answer this question in the context of Camp-Refugees.217 At first glance, it seems that the right to have rights does not apply to the citizenship status of Camp-Refugees. First and most significantly, CampRefugees hold a profound cultural and linguistic affinity with the Indian population of Tamil Nadu. Nasreen Chowdhory argues that through this sense of “belonging”218 with the host population, Camp-Refugees can claim India’s rightful membership.219 In other words, Camp-Refugees need not confine themselves to seeking rights based on nationality. Second, there are growing instances of decoupling rights and citizenship.220 In today’s world, merely belonging to a community may not mean being a politico-legal member and vice versa.221 Anne-Sophie Bentz and Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud specifically illustrate this disaggregation of rights from citizenship by contrasting Camp-Refugees with the urban poor who are formally Indian citizens.222 Bentz and Goreau-Ponceaud argue that despite formal citizenship, the urban poor receive scant State assistance.223 Similarly, D Parthasarathy argues that formal citizenship has not guaranteed substantive rights for marginalised groups like Adivasis and Dalits.224 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 Estate Tamils in India already hold Indian citizenship. ‘…nationality is a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties. It may be said to constitute the juridical expression of the fact that the individual … is in fact more closely connected with the population of the State conferring nationality than with that of any other State.’ as proclaimed in Liechtenstein v Guatemala [1955] ICJ Rep 4. This test is also known as the ‘genuine link’ test or the ‘social fact of attachment’ to a country as put by the International Court of Justice, see generally Audrey Macklin ‘Is it Time to Retire Nottebohm?’ [2017] 111 American Journal of International Law Unbound 492. Chowdhory (n 5) ; Chowdhory (n 64). Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (University of Chicago Press 1994); Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Sage Publications 2011); Seyla Benhabib, ‘“The right to have rights”: Hannah Arendt on the Contradictions of the Nation-state’ in Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge University Press 2004). Lamarr (n 35); Brubaker (n 43); Chowdhory (n 64); Soysal (n 220); Yuval-Davis (n 220); Benhabib (n 220); Patrick Balazo, ‘Better Must Come: Citizenship and Belonging after Statelessness’ [2019] 1 Statelessness and Citizenship Review 5 Bentz and Goreau-Ponceaud (n 79). ibid. D. Parathasarthy, ‘Citizenship (Amendment) Act: The Pitfalls of Homogenising Identities in Resistance Narratives’ [2020] 55 EPW Engage; this argument has been made specifically in relation to the 2019 Act as well as in Suraj Yengde, ‘The Anti-Dalit, Anti-Adivasi Features